Press Release of the Exhibition

The expectation caused by situations of waiting and the attention focused on the trivial actions of the average citizen are present all over the work of Filipa César (b. 1975, Oporto, Portugal). Spaces are replaced by the possibility of a suspended action whose characters reveal a tension, either discreet or profoundly disturbing, caused by the absence of the communication processes.
However, although it films anonymous persons in trivial gestures and common spaces, quite often by the means of illicit recordings (thus violating the right to privacy and the protection of individual intimacy), the artist’s work is set apart from the practice of the documentary register for the practise of a fictional device, supported in the editing possibilities of the videotape process, through the manipulation and reconfiguration of the space/time binomial.

Some of the seminal works of this register, revealing the axis of concerns that form the core of her investigation, are, for example, the titles: Untitled (Romance) (2000) where anonymous persons – filmed in railway and subway stations – are transformed, by the means of video editing, into interpreters of ephemeral relationships through the regard; Untitled (Twirler) (1999) – a title resulting from joining the words “thriller” and “twirl” – results from the appropriation of several scenes taken from that movie genre, where travelling works as a device for action suspense, being, however, the “dénouement” suppressed in the editing process; or Letters (2000), where anonymous characters are succeeded and replaced in a post office that, by recurring to double screening (an unsynchronised mirror of the shot action) and to sound obliteration, produces encounters in which a dialogue seems to take place but one that only reveals the communication process in a differed way and in a closed circuit.

This “distopia” of the communicational act, prolonged in the architectonic framework of anonymous spaces, everyday spaces of share (airport lobbies, railway stations, post offices...), characteristic non-places – lies in the exploration of the interludes in-between actions, of the moments in which apparently nothing happens and in recurring to time as a psychological datum. And thus a field of possibilities is opened to the construction of other fictions on the relational acts.

This set of concerns that involves Filipa César’s research is prolonged in this one-man-show, Sets for Thoughts, opening the October 29 at Cristina Guerra – Contemporary Art and, and is unfolded in a research on the language of art itself, by researching one of the pictorial tradition’s fundamental axis: landscape.

Thus, in the double video screening Product Displacement (2002) (a title deriving from “product placement”: technical slang meaning the infiltration of publicity, within a context and in a subliminal way, in the cinema universe) there is a long travelling through a succession a of “real-life” macro-sets (shot in the interior projection department of a design store chain, the raw material with which each person’s “private worlds” are built), crowded with characters that express themselves by the means of a contemplative lethargy, whose regard is guided by arbitrary details in the set.
By recurring to double screening we have, in parallel, the point of view of the one who is seen: a “dimmed” plan revealing the individual’s psychological state, absorbed in a kind of contemplative trance, similar to an stereographic system in which an image, in here mental, results from focusing a point beyond the material plan.

This psychic trace is linked to the series of 14 diptychs of photographs – whose title is homonymous to the Sets for Thoughts exhibition – showing anonymous individuals, recorded with their backs turned to the observer, who can relate, by an editing artifice, to a fiction on their double point of view, that of who sees and that of who is seen.

The contemplation/melancholy axis, as a subtle note on everyday indolence, is prolonged in a slanting way in Untitled (2002), the projection of a “landscape model” where a bed, by means of travelling, is transformed into a landscape horizon, a romantic reference to a state of “domestic sublime”.

Filipa César will soon be present in the video lodge section of this year’s Art|Basel|Miami Beach- the International Art Fair/ La Exposicion Internacional de Arte (Miami, U.S.A.), being held from the 5th to the 8th of December. H.M.

Press Release of the Exhibition

Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art presents 'Painting', a one man show by Michael Biberstein.

Opening: September 19th 2002, by 10pm.

September 19th to October 26th 2002

Michael Biberstein (b. Solothurm, Switzerland, 1948) has taken a fairly atypical road for someone in the art field. As far as this is concerned, special relevance is given to the study in art history that he developed alongside David Sylvester at Swarthmore College, Philadelphia, and that helped him to become conscious of the pictorial problems that would later become part of his visual work’s body of research. This biographical datum will become structural for his introduction to artistic practice and for the understanding of the whole of his work through a critical revising of the European pictorial tradition, which has been kept as an operative “tool” until this day. In this tradition, his work has been, quite often, incorporated in the practice of landscape as a pictorial genre. But what is the nature of this incorporation and which landscape?
In the artist’s own words, it is “the landscape of painting and not the painting of landscape”, which places us in the limits of the landscape of painting itself, that is to say in the context of its syntax. This inflexion, although apparently minimum, is however revealing of the core of the artist’s research: the concept of landscape is a useful metaphor for the research that he has been developing throughout his more than 30 years of work because it directly implies the context of vision as well as the pictorial corollary of 200 years of European art, in the problems of format and scale that form it.
This research constituted by “landscape through landscape” marks the artist’s journey since the beginning which, because of its length and volume – and, consequently, difficulty in being put in a few words – does not excuse a more attentive reading of the bibliography published on him [see attached biography]. Some key-moments are, however, possible of being pointed out: first of all, in the late 60s, through a systematic all-over-painting work, in a methodological follow-up of the proceedings derived from abstract expressionism; then, in the 70s, by making a theme out of monochrome, which is paradoxically “the starting point and arrival of the practice of painting”, and in exploring the very constitutive elements of the painting lexicon, in methodological and conceptual approaches imported from “linguistic-analytic” processes (that reveal an attentive reading of Wittgenstein) or from structuralism, in what came to be known – in the artist’s ironic phrase – as the “analytic phase”.
This semantic deconstruction of the painting language had been developed, in a parallel way, in a research on the space-dimension itself (in matters such as “wall/floor” or “painting/canvas”) of the context of its reception, and in the embodiment that its perception calls upon, which are concerns very common to the artistic practise of the time.
Thus, the problem of the relation between the painted image and the act of painting, the relation between the painting and the area and the question of area as the key-vehicle of the meaning, together with an acute conscience of the practice of painting in its historical dimension, mark Biberstein’s path since the beginning of his career and have instinctively formed his continued practice.
In the mid-80s an important inflexion in his work has taken place in the light of these principles – one which, as opposing his previous work, has been called “synthetic phase” – towards the landscape of romantic tradition (although both theme and process are not similar to the latter’s), which has coincided with an increase in scale, derived from a continued practice of drawing.
An inflexion towards art as landshafterei, that is, as an abstract and reflex concept of a thought that leads to a peripheral aspect of pictorial tradition: landscape as a field of possibilities to the reformulation of the spectator’s embodiment and as a rehearsal area for painting as an horizon and destination of its artistic practice.

The present one-man show, generically titled “Painting” and starting September 19th at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, is built in the line of this work, revealing, on the other hand, a deepening of that research through the introduction of a wider and firmer chromatic range and through a greater structural density.
In this way, going back to his previous years of activity, the eight acrylic on canvas works being presented reveal painting as a field of possibilities for landscape: no longer immediately recognisable in his gestalt but as the construction of a specific kind of vision (“diffuse vision”), rearranged and converted into landscape by the methodology of a presentation – that which Robert Morris called “a kind of landscape mode”.

This rehabilitation of the problems of perception in art, and its spatial performance in the act of reception, constitutes one of the most current concerns of contemporary art. You shouldn’t, however, find strange the road that Biberstein has been leading either in Portugal (where he lives since 1979) and in the international scene, which has been granting him the inclusion in major exhibitions (for example, in Documenta IX, Kassel, in 1992).
As far as this is concerned, his nomination for the 2002 EDP Painting Award should be mentioned, as well as his soon to be released book, co-ordinated by Delfim Sardo, showing an anthology of his career focused on the central theme of landscape, and the two exhibitions that will soon be held in Switzerland (at Helmaus, Zurich and Kunsthalle; Solothurn). H.M.

Press Release of the Exhibition

Press Release of the Exhibition

Cristina Guerra Contemporary ArtPresents 'Towards the End of the Beginning', a one man show by Lawrence Weiner

Opening 9th May 2002 at 10pm
9th of May to the 15th of June 2002
Tuesday to friday 10am/8pm
Saturday 12pm/8pm

The exhibition 'Towards the End of the Beginning', from Lawrence Weiner - specifically made for this space - will open Thursday the 9th of May around 22.00 h.
This exhibition will be open every Tuesday to Friday, from 10 .00 to 20.00 and on Saturdays from 12.00 to 20.00.
We will be showing a instalation/sculpture presented in four parts as well as it will be shown two DVD films: Wild Blue Yonder (2001-02) and Blue Moon Over (2001-02).

Over more than three decades of 'language + the materials referred to', have been the forming factors in Lawrence Weiner’s artistic practice, and the communication about ideas and materials in the physical world have formed the parameters of his work. His work became known by the removal of the physical element of sculpture and by the insistence on common, accessible sistems of distribution. Since 1967-68 that he develops a sculpture based on language that not only assumes the form of instalation as well as a whole group of supports such as: books, comics, posters, songs and urban interventions and art for public spaces. He has been using film and video as sistems of presentation since 1970.

Recent projects include:
A BASIC ASSUMPTION, outdoor work in the Birmingham Art Museum, Alabama during June 2002
PER SE/POR SI MESMO, at the Palacio de Cristal ans Library MNCARS, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Rainha Sofia, Madrid, 2001
BENT AND BROKEB SHAFTS OF LIGHT, at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany 2000-01